She saw Nazis burn books. A CT Holocaust survivor makes sure kids have reading access she was denied
Ruth Weiner believes that, “when a child has a difficult reality, if they are able to read, they have an escape hatch. It’s that simple.”
The 92-year-old Holocaust survivor is speaking from experience.
Weiner spoke while sitting in the book room she created, tucked away on the top floor of the Sue Ann Shay Place apartments in Hartford. The permanent supportive housing facility on Pliny Street is home to some 32 households, mostly families who have experienced homelessness.
“When this building went up and we discovered that we had this room left, with no particular use destined for it, I brought up the idea,” she said. Weiner and her husband Myron provided furniture and solicited donations of books to create the cozy space, now filled with places to sit and lined with bookshelves.
But don’t call it a library.
“The kids are encouraged to find books, enjoy them and keep them,” she said. “They become the owners of books, get invested in them, and that’s huge.”
Over the years, the book room has also been a space where Weiner could meet with many of the children she has helped. Before the pandemic, she would host story times there several times a month.
Kristen Wieber is youth coordinator for My Sister’s Place, which operates the apartments. She runs programs for the more than 50 children who live here, and she said finding a secret bookworm can be one of the most rewarding aspects of the book room.
“The kids have a little bit more of a reverence for this space than they do for the youth room downstairs,” she said.
“They’re allowed to come in here and take as many books as you can. We do have some kids who come in here and they stack up and they’re walking down the hall, waddling!”
Neighborhood renewal
Ruth Weiner was on the board of My Sister’s Place when the project to build the Shay Apartments was first planned. She describes years of fighting to get the formerly brownfield site remediated, and gaining permissions for the new facility. Then in 2013 came the satisfaction of watching the long-awaited project rise from the ground.
“I love watching buildings go up, I always have,” she said. “I used to come and see it. There’s a Yiddish word called kvell, which is when you just look at something and you ooze happiness.”
It was additionally meaningful for her, because the Pliny Street site is just a couple of streets away from the place she stayed when she first arrived in Hartford as a war refugee. “This was my neighborhood,” she recalled.
Over the years, she has begun to reflect on the similarities that many of these children share with her own experience.
“I knew what it was like to be homeless, and about as homeless as you can be, because not only did we not have a roof over our head that was ours, we didn’t even have a country,” she said. “So, yeah, I know what it is to be not rooted.”
Life turned upside down
Weiner was still in elementary school when the Nazis marched into her home, the city of Vienna, in 1938.
“It was really a very sudden and very drastic change,” she said. “Your life turned upside down. Within 48 hours you lived in a different world.” A world where Jews like Ruth were excluded, humiliated and deported to concentration camps.
Though she was only 8 years old, she thinks of those days as the end of her childhood. “You became a little adult very quickly.”
She was forced to leave the school she had been attending, and for a while she traveled across the city each day, two tram-rides away, to a Jewish school. “You really learned how to make yourself invisible,” she says of that time.
It was outside her new school that she was a witness to some of the first book burnings carried out in the city.
“They had begun very early, emptying out the bookstores. And I was already a big reader at that time. I was upset at watching these books come out and getting dumped on the sidewalk in a big pile,” she said. “But then as we left school, we saw that they had lit all these books and it was just this flaming pyre.”
She and a friend walked past as quickly as they could. She still remembers the smell.
By this time her father had been imprisoned for political activities, and her mother was spending hours each day navigating seemingly impenetrable bureaucracy to find a way for the family to escape the city.
They were helped by a friend of her father’s who had joined the Nazi party and had connections to get them out of Vienna. Ruth, her father and her mother all made it to London, but there they were split up for a time.
“That was a very tough part of my life,” she said. “I couldn’t speak the language. I had just lost everything, my parents, my family, my life.”
But because of her mother’s earlier efforts in Vienna, they were already in line for a rare American visa, and after about a year in England, the three were reunited and able to leave for New York.
Career educator
They came to Hartford through a friend of her father’s, and spent a couple of months living in the spare bedroom of another refugee family in Garden Street.
Ruth flourished in Hartford. She attended Weaver High School, where she was valedictorian, then went on to UConn and eventually a masters at the University of Hartford.
She is a career educator, having served as the first principal of Solomon Schechter Day School in West Hartford, and the principal of Hebrew High School among many other positions.
Now long retired from paid work, she is still teaching – these days mostly about the Holocaust. Through the organization Voices of Hope, she travels to schools around Connecticut to talk to students about her experiences.
She always tells them they can ask anything they want.
“You would not believe the questions that I get,” she said. “They are amazing. These kids are smart, they’re empathetic. The questions are profound in ways that you absolutely would not expect. It’s a very positive experience for me every single time.”
She has been asked if she ever wishes she were not Jewish, and if she still believes in God. Another question she gets frequently – “do you think something like this could happen again?”
Her answer is yes, unfortunately, and that we may be closer to it than we realize.
“If you take a look at all the steps that preceded the Holocaust, it took Hitler about seven years before he was able to get the German people on board with his philosophy,” she said. “And there’s a playbook. Strategy after strategy, we’re playing out that playbook. It’s very scary.”
She and her husband lived for a few years in Israel in the 1950s and both are deeply disturbed by the recent violence there. She also sees a rise in antisemitism closer to home.
”You’ve got to have a scapegoat, and antisemitism has been the classic strategy because it works so well,” she said.
It’s not something she tries to hide from the students she reaches.
“I have a couple of thoughts that I try to leave with the kids,” she said, “one of which is that the only thing worse than talking about bad things is not talking about those bad things. Because not talking about them will not make them go away.”
She brought that philosophy to her book room readings and activities here at the Shay Apartments. One of her most vivid memories is of meeting with a group of middle schoolers to introduce them to Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl. She brought copies of the book for each child, and also provided them with their own diaries.
“We had a second session about two months later,” she said. “And their assignment was that you had to write in your diary three times a week. It was unbelievable what these kids came back with, after having read Anne Frank. That was one of the most moving episodes that I ever had, the empathy that these kids had and the degree to which it spoke to them.”
She hopes this book room will continue to be a space where children can learn to believe in themselves, and others.